Why we moved our startup to Dubai

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Two months ago I moved our startup from Kuwait to Dubai (we also
have another office in Malaga, Spain which is still running). But
making the final decision to move wasn’t at all easy.

Many startups are going through the same decision-making
process; we all hear that Dubai is probably the best location to
build a business in the region, but incidentally it’s also the most
expensive. So why did we ultimately decide to make the move to
Dubai while keeping our costs low? Here’s how.

Our fishing boat charter startup, Fishfishme, turned 1 this June.
Though our website has been live since last October, we have
constantly tested and improved our platform, trying to follow the Lean
Startup model very closely, and later launched our new website this past February.
Immediately we saw a boost in business with more and more bookings
and clicks on the site. The majority of our bookings continued to
come from Kuwait, where I started the company, as we spent most of
our marketing efforts there. Things continued to move forward in
Kuwait and we quickly met and surpassed our projections.

But one day I had a conversation with our mentor Omar Koudsi,
the co-founder of Jeeran, and he
gave us a piece of advice that changed how we approached our
business. “Kuwait is a great place, but its such a small and unique
market that doesn’t really represent other markets around the
world,” he said. “You need a big city with a bigger and more
competitive market. If you win in this market, then you can take
what you’ve learned, repeat it, and win in every market. I think
you should move to Dubai.” He ended his advice saying honestly,
“Moving to Dubai will either be great for your business or a great
learning experience. Either way you win.”

Omar’s advice really hit me. I realized that Kuwait is a great
place to test our idea, but not the best place to put our focus if
we eventually want to grow to be a global company. When I went back
to review our numbers, everything indicated that Dubai could
actually be a much better market for us; there are five times more
charter boats, a much bigger market with 10 million tourists each
year and with the charters we already had available there, our
margins were regularly are 4 times better than Kuwait. It was a no
brainer.

Some may say that we don’t really need to be in Dubai because
our business is based online. Indeed we are, but not every online
startup can be run from anywhere. For some heavy tech startups,
location may be irrelevant (such as Google, Facebook), but for a
marketplace startup such as ours, we need to be on the ground,
especially in the early days. Another one of our mentors, Mohammad
Alzubi, explained clearly to us that we need to be located in the
heart of our target market: “if you want to focus in Dubai you’ll
need to be in Dubai. You need to be close to your boat partners and
your customers. You need to be there to gain their trust, to hear
their feedback and to better understand the market. Being a
tech-startup doesn’t mean that you need to be behind the laptop,
it’s still a business and you need to be with your customers most
of the time.”

His advice confirmed reinforced the decision for us, so we moved
to Dubai.

In Dubai

Now that I’ve settled in Dubai, the biggest hurdle is figuring
out our new operations and logistics arrangements. Besides having
to convince my parents that this is a good idea, which wasn’t easy
by the way, I first had to find a place to live and work, and find
transportation. Check out
this post on my blog detailing some of my expenses so far.

On top of living expenses, my biggest headache so far has been
was the costs associated with establishing the company in Dubai and
renting office space. But luckily, new incubator In5 came to the rescue.

Created by Dubai Internet City, In5 provides pretty affordable
office space (AED 1,000 per month or US $272) and a huge discount
for everything related to government costs (such as company
registration fees, visas for employees, and the like). In5 chooses
ten startups to incubate every three months offering their
facilities and support without asking for anything in return, even
equity. So far, joining In5 has been great for Fishfishme, not only
because it saves us money, but also because it is a great way to
plug in with the community. Check out my full blog post about the
experience
here.

After two months living in Dubai, our team can already feel the
benefits of moving here. It changes the way you think about your
startup, pushes you to think bigger and really prepares you to
become a more global startup. Each day we get to meet interesting
people that open our eyes to new opportunities and we continue to
get new exposure from media and are already working with new
partners to grow the business. Though only time will tell if we
made the right move, much of our recent growth wouldn’t have
happened if I stayed in Kuwait.

In short, I think every company should try to operate closer to
their customers, suppliers or skilled labor force; for us Dubai has
all three. Let us know if the comments section below if you are
considering moving your startup to Dubai or, if you have, let us
know how the experience has been.

Abdullah is the co-founder ofÂ fishfishme.com, and he also started a blog and a monthly event calledÂ StartupQ8Â to help building a Startup Ecosystem in Kuwait. You can follow him on twitter @a_alshalabi.